Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/052592/05259928.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 4KB | 84 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 67

CINEMA

Surviving in A New World


By RICHARD SCHICKEL

    TITLE: Far and Away
    DIRECTOR: Ron Howard
    WRITER: Bob Dolman

    THE BOTTOM LINE: Irish immigrants come to 19th century
America and come of age in epic style.


    Far and Away is almost an oxymoron. It is, to use two
words that rarely rub shoulders, a genial epic. Big historical
movies usually revolve around great figures (Gandhi, T.E.
Lawrence) or great historical moments (the Russian Revolution,
the parting of the Red Sea), and they always resonate with
instructive messages for the modern audience (as in Dances with
Wolves).

    But Ron Howard's film tells the simple tale of a spunky,
apparently mismatched Irish couple, Tom Cruise and Nicole
Kidman, who come to the U.S. at the end of the 19th century and
come of age in the process. He's Joseph, a tenant farmer whose
family is driven off its picturesque corner of the Ould Sod by
the cruel agents of an absentee landlord. She's Shannon, the
landlord's daughter, who falls in love with Joseph at first
sight, even though he turns up on her father's estate, ancient
rifle in hand, to take vengeance.

    Obviously they are made for each other, class distinctions
be damned. And the two actors (who are married in real life)
are awfully good together. He's stubborn, hot tempered and a
survivor; she's all high spirits and willfulness, and they both
know how to find the comic side of those traits, because, starry
glamour aside, they are resourceful actors. Determined to avoid
an arranged marriage to Stephen (Thomas Gibson), the very
steward who is the source of Joseph's troubles, Shannon runs
away to America, taking Joseph along as her servant.

    Their dream is free land, but before they can attain it --
in the Oklahoma land rush that is the movie's smashing climax
-- they must endure a long, penniless passage in the Boston
slums, where they live as brother and sister in a rented
whorehouse room. They're the only residents unable to assuage
their sexual itch, and, madly sublimating, Joseph becomes a
bareknuckle boxer in a sporting club. It is here, at its center,
that Far and Away takes its biggest chances, for this section
is dark and claustrophobic and concludes melodramatically with
Shannon near death and Joseph carrying her through a blizzard
seeking help.

    Somehow it works, in part because of the way director
Howard keeps his crowded frames abustle with activity, in part
because of the sheer indomitability with which his leading
characters are endowed by the actors and by writer Dolman, but
mostly because the movie takes enlivening chances with its
material: precognitive dreams, for example, and near death
out-of-body experiences. Flirtations with magic realism are not
at all what we expect to find in epic cinema.

    But Howard, whose best work (Splash and Cocoon) has been
fantastical, uses these devices unpretentiously. He's not a man
who likes to force his effects. There are times when one wishes
he did push his -- and our -- emotions just a little harder and
wind the story's suspense just a little tighter. He needs,
perhaps, to be a little less self-effacing as a director,
especially with a film like this, which was inspired by his own
ancestors' immigrant experiences and clearly means a great deal
to him. On the other hand, a firm sense of human scale is no
small virtue in such a project, and neither is a good sense of
humor, which keeps reminding us that the grandeur of what
American immigration achieved historically was created out of
less-than-grand, occasionally absurd human motives.